What Truth Sounds Like

$24.99$24.99

Required

QTY

What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James
Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in Americaby Michael Eric Dyson

24.99

What Truth Sounds Like exists at the
tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy – of whether
we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial
landscape. The future of race and democracy hang in the balance.

The fraught
conflict between conscience and politics – between morality and power – in
addressing race hardly began with Clinton. An electrifying and traumatic
encounter in the sixties crystallized these furious disputes.

In 1963
Attorney General Robert Kennedy sought out James Baldwin to explain the rage
that threatened to engulf black America. Baldwin brought along some friends,
including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and a
valiant activist, Jerome Smith. It was Smith’s relentless, unfiltered fury that
set Kennedy on his heels, reducing him to sullen silence.

Kennedy
walked away from the nearly three-hour meeting angry – that the black folk
assembled didn’t understand politics, and that they weren’t as easy to talk to
as Martin Luther King. But especially that they were more interested in witness
than policy. But Kennedy’s anger quickly gave way to empathy, especially for
Smith. “I guess if I were in his shoes…I might feel differently about this
country.” Kennedy set about changing policy – the meeting having transformed
his thinking in fundamental ways.

There was
more: every big argument about race that persists to this day got a hearing in
that room. Smith declaring that he’d never fight for his country given its
racist tendencies, and Kennedy being appalled at such lack of patriotism,
tracks the disdain for black dissent in our own time. His belief that black
folk were ungrateful for the Kennedys’ efforts to make things better shows up
in our day as the charge that black folk wallow in the politics of ingratitude
and victimhood. The contributions of black queer folk to racial progress still
cause a stir. BLM has been accused of harboring a covert queer agenda. The
immigrant experience, like that of Kennedy – versus the racial experience of
Baldwin – is a cudgel to excoriate black folk for lacking hustle and ingenuity.
The questioning of whether folk who are interracially partnered can
authentically communicate black interests persists. And we grapple still with
the responsibility of black intellectuals and artists to bring about social
change.